The United Macedonian Diaspora (UMD) strongly condemns today’s unconstitutional and parliamentary deviation from the rules of procedure in Macedonia’s Parliament when adopting the law on languages, and calls for the immediate annulment of it. UMD calls on members of Parliament who have spoken against the law on the use of languages to submit a parliamentary initiative for the impeachment of, and illegally-elected, Parliament Speaker, Talat Xhaferi.
UMD wish to inform the public that from March 14, 2018, it is stopping all communications with the current government of the Republic of Macedonia and the MPs who voted for the law on the use of languages, and publicly refrains from any future cooperation with this government structure which, instead of protecting them, damages the national interests and grossly hinders the unitary sovereign character of the state.
For more than 25 years, SDSM and VMRO-DPMNE have sold Macedonian national interests in order to create and maintain a government coalition. A political model where there are ethnic and not civil political parties leads to further discord in society, and not towards a European future, and to which practice UMD considers it is high time to put an end to.
Today, SDSM MPs, blindly guided by party interests, forgot that they have been elected to defend the democratic order and the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia. They forgot that the Parliament is a branch of a system that serves for democratic open debate, where unconstitutional laws are blocked not created. They forgot that they are Macedonians. Today these MPs knowingly walked over the ideals of Ilinden and ASNOM and all the heroes who laid down their lives for an independent Republic of Macedonia.
In these moments, political blurring is superfluous. Macedonian interests and the destruction of the country’s unitary character were auctioned, even though in the Republic of Macedonia minorities already enjoy some of the highest human rights and the use of languages in all of Europe. Zoran Zaev, like all other political subjects from this government, no longer has the integrity and authority to lead the country under these conditions. Instead of taking the country out of a political crisis, they pushed it into a deeper one, and on that basis UMD demands the immediate resignation of the Prime Minister and the government of the Republic of Macedonia, as well as an announcement for early parliamentary elections.
UMD invites all institutions in the state in accordance with their competencies to immediately stand in defense of the unity, sovereignty and constitutionality of the Republic of Macedonia. UMD welcomes the timely reaction of the President of the Republic of Macedonia, Gjorgje Ivanov, in not signing this law, and calls on him to use all means at his disposal in the defense of Macedonian national interests. We call on the Macedonian people in the state to use their democratic right to peaceful protest as a way of expressing dissatisfaction with the policies of the government and the Parliament of the Republic of Macedonia.
Inevitably, UMD calls upon the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Macedonia, in the shortest possible time, to pronounce the law on the use of languages, in which the Parliamentary procedure, by disabling and ignoring a public hearing on the occasion of the amendments submitted, violates the Constitution of the Republic of Macedonia. According to events which are a precedent in the foundations of Macedonian democracy, UMD appeals for an investigation in which everyone involved in today’s trampling of the Constitution will be criminally responsible before the law.